THE PRIVATE FILM.
My attention has been drawn to the most recent and perhaps the most terrible development of the Cinema by an advertisement, from which I take the following extracts:—
"HAVE YOUR OWN FILM TAKEN.
The most Modern Method of gaining Publicity.
To Members of Parliament, Mayors, Lecturers and other Public Men and Women.
"The Cinema has become the cheapest, the surest and most rapid road to publicity. It is estimated that a third of the population attend the Cinema once a week. Messrs. Mump and Gump have therefore fitted up a special studio for film work, in which you can now have your own film taken, representing you in any action you may desire. This method of publicity is specially recommended to Members of Parliament. For instance one can be filmed writing a letter, which can be closed down and handed to a messenger, which action can be followed by the letter itself being thrown on the screen.... Think what this means to a prospective Candidate when he goes to a constituency where he is unknown. He takes with him twenty or more films. Your constituents must see and know you before you can hope for their vote. The Cinema introduces your personality and your policy.
"Your film will cost you—
First reel ... Three guineas.
Each extra reel. One guinea."
The more I see of business-men the less they seem to me to know about business. I never read an advertisement without thinking, "How much better I (or even you) could have done that!" Yet they will tell you that it is their advertisements which make the money. It only shows.... However. Messrs. Mump and Gump, for instance, have scarcely skimmed the surface possibilities of their brilliant notion. This invention is going to make politics tolerable at last. No man minds being in the House of Commons; it is being in his constituency which is so dreadful. And now he need never go there.
For instance, when the constituency is tired of the letter-film, he can be filmed making a speech, which can be taken down and handed to a typist, which action can be followed by the speech itself being thrown on the screen—in instalments. The constituency will enjoy this, because it will take much less time to read it than it would to listen to it, and they can argue out loud about the meaning of Early English phrases like Datum-line and Functional Representation. In fact they can go on arguing during the Whips of Sin which will follow.
As for the public man, it won’t take him two minutes to be filmed making the speech, unless, of course, he has any very complicated gestures; and it won’t take him any time at all to compose it, because the private secretary will do that; and the private secretary will be able to make sure that his joke about Jereboam is not turned into a joke about Jehoshaphat at the last minute, or simply shelved in favour of a peroration on rainbows. After the speech the M.P. can be filmed opening a flowershow and, if necessary, writing a cheque to the local hortiphilist society, which cheque can be thrown on the screen amid loud applause, but need not, of course, go any further.
There is one other point, but it is rather a delicate matter: Messrs. Mump and Gump say to the prospective Candidate, "Your constituents must see and know you before you can hope for their vote." Are they quite right? I have seen a good many Candidates in my time, and I can think of some to whom I should have said, "Your constituents must never see you if you hope for a single vote." I mean, when one looks round the present House of Commons, one really marvels how.... But perhaps I had better not go on with that. The point is that a Candidate of that kind never need be seen by his constituents now. A handsome young private secretary, uniformed and beribboned, and the film does the rest.
Then I rather resent the assumption that Members of Parliament, Mayors, Lecturers and Actors are the only people who require publicity. I should have thought that those who spend their time writing things in the public Press, which are read by the public (if anybody), might have had at least the courtesy title of Public Man. Anyhow, I am going to have three guineas’ worth. The only question is, what sort of picture will most thoroughly "get" my personality before a third of the population once a week? The moment when I am most characteristic is when I am lying in a hot bath, and to-morrow is Sunday; but I doubt if even a sixth of the population would be really keen on that. I don’t mind writing a letter or two, only, if it meant an extra reel every time I decided to write it to-morrow instead, it would be rather a costly advertisement.
Really, I suppose, one ought to be done At Work in His Study; but even that would require a good deal of faking. Ought one, for instance, to remove the golf-balls and the cocoa-cup (and the rhyming dictionary) from The Desk? Then I always write with a decayed pencil, and that would look so bad. Messrs. Mump and Gump would have to throw in a quill-pen. And I have no Study. I work in the drawingroom, when the children are not playing in it. To go into The Study I simply walk over to my table and put up a large notice: "The Study. Do not Speak to Me. I am Thinking." Do you think that had better be in the film?
Or I wonder if a Comic would be more effective—a Shaving reel or a Dressing reel? It is the small incidents of every-day life that one should look to for the key to the character of a Public Man; and once a whole third of the population had seen for themselves what pain it gives me to put links and studs and all those things in a clean shirt, they would understand the strange note of melancholy which runs through this article.
But of course an author should have several different reels corresponding to the different kinds of work which he wants to publicitise. (That is a new word which I have just invented, but you will find it in common use in a month or two.) People like Mr. Belloc will probably require the full politician’s ration of twenty or more, but the ordinary writer might rub along with four or five.
When his Pug, Wog and Pussy is on the market there will be a Family reel, in which he is pretending to be a tree and the children are climbing it. And when he has just published The Cruise of the Cow; or, Seven Hours at Sea, he will be seen with an intense expression tying a bowline on a bight or madly hauling on the throat-halyard—at Messrs. Mump and Gump’s specially-equipped ponds. And for his passionate romance, The Borrowed Bride—— But I don’t know what he will do then.
And even now we have not exhausted the list of Public Men. There are clergymen. Don’t you feel that some of those sermons might be thrown on the screen—and left there? A. P. H.